Microsoft has reported record financial results for the quarter ending June 30, and the big money maker was Windows. Despite attempts at Jedi mind trickery involving cloud services, the company remains firmly wedded to the earth-bound PC.
Revenue for Windows jumped 43 per cent during the company's fiscal fourth quarter, to $4. …

RE: If Redmond understood cloud

"If they understood what cloud computing is....." Yeah, right, so the problem that ALL the vendors have a different version of what cloud is (and most of it is just old outsourcing and datawarehousing tech wrapped up in new marketting) just doesn't have any bearing? Or that us customers not only don't have a clear view of what cloud is but also if we actually need it. OK, if you are so sure of yourself, please define EXACTLY what a cloud is, what services it should offer, and to which customers. I can guarantee it will take only five minutes of Yahoogling of the buzzwords from your reply to identify exactly which vendor's koolaid you've been drinking.

Azure and AppEngine

having worked on projects on both Azure and AppEngine they're both interesting, and both have their pros... but there are cons for both as well

random scalability is nice, but at a cost of the flexibility you get building an app that runs on a generic server (be it Windows or Linux) .. sometimes the different rules (eg SQL Azure performance is nowhere near as good as on a regular stand-alone server or AppEngine has no SQL capabilities and is pretty crap for batch/background processing)

for a single location company .... I wonder if it will ever be a better solution (unless the network is as reliable between you and the cloud as the local network is) in the same way relying on gmail for email in the cloud is a lot less reliable than being able to sync Exchange to Outlook on my PC

Why...

I did a quick survey in the office and 100% had the general conseus of **** off.

Yes they may do some thing online, sorry in the cloud, the general consesus was, don't trust em with my stuff.

Let's look at the benefits of the cloud over your own network...

Now lets look at the disadvantages.

You rely on a network connection

"Upgrades" are forced upon you wether you like it or not.

"Ugrades" are forced on you even if they compleltey **** up your setup

In 5 years when you are locked in, they can up the charges by 50% and the is bugger all you can do about it. At least with desktops you can say, nope, won't pay that, I'll stick with the old one thanks.

They can decide to shut the service down and there is sod all you can do about it. Just look at how many onlines services get culled each year.

I question the use of the word competencey....

when you buy into some of their office tools in 2010 and get told you have to downgrade your servers to server 2003 32bit because there are some compatability issues with the latest server software all they are really good at is making money in those fields.

Only thing they are good at?

You mean, ludicrous marketing campaigns and suing competitors over ideas the competitors had first? Can't be operating systems, the last two just plain don't work right. Or corporate office stuff; from an administrator's point of view, that stuff isn't worth the time and effort necessary just to keep it running halfway decently so the users don't complain TOO loudly. (cue FORMAT C:, install Linux w/OpenGroupware -- happy admin, happy users.)

Not wise to put all eggs in one basket

Geoff, you always have to be on the lookout for a flank attack from competitors (targeting related segments which you have neglected). If I were Microsoft I would continue to do what they are doing, maintain solid results from core businesses and use some of the profits to fund opportunities elsewhere. (Generic strategies that commonly arise from BCG matrix analysis).

Poor bastards...

Cloud

@Matt Bryant

Cloud is taking the distributed management and services philosophy of the botnet and implementing it to provide useful services in legal ways. It allows for dynamic scaling of resources to meet demand. It's been around for a long time - obviously the botnets have been using it forever, as have Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others. These days it's being pitched as a suite of products so you can have the cloud without rolling your own solution at great expense like they did. Of course everybody with a product to sell wants to redefine the "cloud" term so that it describes their product and noone else's - but that doesn't take away the utility of the idea itself, it's just business.

What services? Almost all of them of course. The applications that aren't well served by a self-scaling distributed architecture are pretty rare. Of course some few are tied to legacy hardware and software architectures and have to be rebuilt with the cloud in mind. Basically you take a thin operating system image virtual machine and build each service on that with the presumption that the service will be managed by the cloud so have cloud management hooks, it will only perform a scalable subset of the whole service, will operate only with resources that are dynamically assigned and be redundant. The management of the cloud is just a management VM built on these principles. They don't even have to be virtual machines, but that's pretty much how this is being implemented and sold right now because it simplifies a lot of things.

Using a cloud internal services architecture allows you to offload your internal workloads to compatible hosted services - when appropriate - to handle demand spikes or outages. If you're interested in this facility you have to consider the need from the beginning because cloud is new and some service providers may go away over time, leaving you with a cloud infrastructure that has no external service providers to provide this service.

One problem with cloud implementation is that it requires robust fast network connections between sites to provide professional levels of service. The downside is that if the network is down, you're sunk. But isn't that the case anyway? Another problem with it is that it's scary: the database guy is really comforted by the idea that there's an identifiable physical server out there that his code is running on and with cloud technologies that's just not the case. A third problem is that it's so different from the way things have been traditionally done that it can be hard to get people to go along with it and reorganize their activity. In the current model there are storage people and server people and network people and each of them has their turf and may feel threatened by the change.

RE: @Matt Bryant

No, but WIkipeadia want their entry back. You just described a virtualised, outsourced service, where the outsourcer is offering more systems for scaling as required, so nothing new. I had a friend that ran a very profitable business doing exactly such for webservers back in the late '90s. All the intervening years have added is new players and several tons of marketting. Want a broader example, then go look at hp's old adaptive architecture pitch from about ten years ago, which was broken down into individual products because too few customers were willing to scrap all their old datacenters and switch to completely new ones built to the hp model. The only new thing about "cloud" is the shiney wrapper the salesgrunts have come up with.